


PURGATORY | RICHARD HARROW

by manhattan_mari



Category: Boardwalk Empire
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:28:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26554360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manhattan_mari/pseuds/manhattan_mari
Summary: " Someone took you out of my arms / But still I feel / The thrill of your charms "ghost!richard just wants to say goodbye.
Relationships: Richard Harrow/Julia Sagorsky
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	PURGATORY | RICHARD HARROW

_The golden vision had faded._

Richard opened both eyes.

He stood without pain.

He took a step, but sand did not collapse and fold under his shoe. He took another. The morning sun was too cheerful for the qrotesque scene that splayed out behind him, but he could not feel it. It cast no shadows. No one was here; it must have still been early. The light was bright but thin, as though filtered through a dusty lamp shade.

The seagulls flew on in the salted air and crabs scuttled and dug for shelter. The peaceful silence was broken by a woman's frantic scream, and he spun around, or tried to, for he couldn't seem to move fast.

He followed her panicked gaze to under the boardwalk, where propped next to the windbeaten post was a body.

_Oh sweet Lord._

The woman clasped a pale hand to her face and screamed again, and ran up the thin wooden steps, her shoes seeming egregiously loud in the presence of such a violently peaceful death.

Flies swarmed around the open mouth, in awe at a glimmering mirage now gone and collapsed, given way to a purgatory, where blood had pooled and dripped and congealed, and around the hole at his side. The buzzing was eerily loud and the smell must've been rancid. Richard wouldn't know.

He turned back to the sky and looked up. Was he supposed to be there? Or down below?

Anyway, he should not have been standing on this beach. Perhaps this _was_ purgatory, for the sins accumulated and repented for, but not enough? In any case he did not spend his time wondering, but wandered up the stairs. He stood on the boardwalk without being there. He stood and existed and people continued on their way, brushing sleep from their eyes. He saw a policeman walking towards him, looking peeved. "If you're pullin' my leg, lady," he muttered, "at this hour..."

Richard stepped back to let him pass on impulse, though of course it didn't matter. The world moved on around him and his semi-existience.

×××

"God- _fucking_ -dammit!" Nucky Thompson exclaimed as he slammed down a phone in a hallway, nearly upsetting the mug of coffee that perched next to it.

A voice Richard didn't recognize- a woman's Southern drawl- called out, "What's that, now?"

Richard didn't walk into the room to see who it was, for fear she was getting dressed, and even in his non-physical state it felt very wrong to even think of such a thing. This felt private. But then, Nucky was certainly fuming about him.

"They found his body. The hitman." Nucky drank the coffee that still steamed quite a bit, but he seemed not to notice.

"Poor guy."

Nucky had been taught better than to speak ill of the dead, but he thought it all the same: _Never should have trusted Harrow._ He had always put Nucky on edge. All he said was: "Poor Chalky, more like it."

"He lost his life over a job," the woman said, stepping from her seclusion now. (Richard had been correct; it had been a bedroom, and she was in a robe and nothing more.) " _That_ you _gave him,_ " her tone could've suggested, but it didn't; for that matter Richard hoped Nucky didn't dwell on it or feel too badly. Not that he would.

"Chalky lost his daughter." The expression on Nucky's face hinted at a side of him Richard had never seen, despite having lived in his house, and Richard felt his stomach drop. The woman looked just as hesitant, but the moment was dismissed when Nucky opened his mouth again; "Do I have to tell his family?"

 _How would you do that?_ Richard asked silently, but he knew, as he had heard Gillian mutter a time or two, that Nucky Thompson could do anything.

×××

"... acting like there's nobody else on Earth who knew him as well as you did!" Julia said, not caring that her voice broke, or that she had yelled; all that reverbrated through her mind was the _did._

Emma's grip tightened on the table she stood next to, and her eyes were cast downward but Julia knew angry tears welled there, a thinly veiled, grieved bride.

Emma remembered the day she'd gotten a telegram saying that her brother was alive. Injured but _alive._ She had promised him silently that she would protect him, and selfishly, it was probably mostly for herself. He would be safe as long as she was alive, she had vowed, but he had recovered and left her. The bittersweet thorn that had cut at her by her brother's sudden indifference toward her had drawn blood, then half healed, then the slice tore open again the winter he had arrived on her porch. But he was safe. She had kept her promise even as it tugged farther away and to the back of her mind. And now he was gone again. She had not protected him. He had gone off to fight in that nonsense of a war that gangster men do. "You don't understand," she said, her voice low.

"I understand a lot more than you think." _I understand what it's like to get that telegram. One second the world is normal and the next nothing is real. The nights awake reliving every stupid comment, when you'd taken him for granted. The notion that the last time you saw him you trusted he'd be back. And suddenly he's gone, poof, and it doesn't seem real because you did not witness it. I never even got a body to bury. I got a headstone bearing pretty words to guard nothing, Ceberus growling at the flicker of a footstep, sulking over an empty Hell_.

"What it's like to-"

"To lose your brother? Yeah, I think I know a goddamn thing or two."

Emma flinched. Julia was hardened to the notion, as Emma was to that of losing a husband. Richard knew it, and with that cruel realization it came upon him that he was truly gone, even if he was stuck here to witness the subtle turmoil he had caused by hesitating, and skewing a shot; he was no more than a whisper of activity in a crowded room in a fleeting attempt to finish something already done with, painting a solid color over a masterpiece. He hadn't finished a thing in that club but himself, and he'd known it was to happen, as he stood waiting, willing the bullets to fly faster.

 _"You would. Kill your brother?"_ he'd said once to Eli. He could not imagine doing a thing to harm his sister. It would be losing a part of himself (that had not been lost already, and much more important). Now, it was he who was gone, after only narrowly avoiding it years ago... He'd hurt her now, once again. He was going to Hell, wasn't he?- after this botched Purgatory...?

He reached out. Touched Emma's shoulder, and she did not flinch but placed a hand there where the air felt cool so that despite planes of existence their hands touched, but she could not dwell on that for long, for there came the rush of footsteps and the door slammed open, a hysterical Tommy standing there, angry and unhinged.

 _Tommy_ , Richard thought, _Stand still and let me hug you one last time, feel your arms around my neck again, please, please, God, let me have just that... Once more..._

" _Stop it!"_ Tommy screamed, "Stop it, stop _fighting_!" When he'd gulped another breath he rounded on Emma. "It's not good for the baby."

She opened her mouth and not a word came out but only the furious, choked breath that only Richard was close enough to hear.

"You're not helping! Nothing's helping! Don't you gettit? He loved- loved you both and you're too stubborn to get over yourselves an'..." Tommy trailed off, cutting short what would have been a stirring monolouge, if it hadn't been for his throat closing around tears. He blinked at Julia for a moment before hugging at her waist. "Just _s_ _top_ ," he pleaded.

Richard found that emotions were very different from physical sensations, because his heart broke and broke again, over and over in frustration because he wanted to take Julia's face in his hands. _"I'm here. I'm_ here _!_ " when he also found he could not feel the floor under his shoes, or where the bullet had struck him.

 _Julia, my darling, I love you_ , he thought desperately. _I love you. You made me feel alive for a reason when all reason was gone but Tommy... you still do even now that I am standing here without breathing._ He wanted to say it aloud, to hear his own voice again not maimed or staccato'd, but there would be no use. _And Tommy... I doubt I can stay here long enough to see you turn a day older, let alone eighteen, or thirty... Please be safe and be smart and remember your father and your mother and remember_ me, _please, please... Though I don't know if I deserve it... I tried... I_ tried _to..._

Emma could not help her brother now. He had made his choice. Now she could pray he went to Heaven and pray she could handle living when so many were dead. Her mother she was prepared for. Her father made her an orphan. Jerry had made her a lovesick widow... How had that been fair? God had let someone steal her heart and hold it and suddenly snatch him back, along with all the trust she'd given him wrapped in the paper of a quiet kiss or the grasp of a hand...? How dare He?

And Richard seemed to hurt the most of all. He had come back from a war that had threatened and challenged in all its smoke and gunfire. He had come back from seven years of evading her letters. He did not come back after she'd killed a man in her barn. After he'd hugged her and had seemed to trust her, know her again.

_Let me give my heart up and smash the box I put it in. Lead my brother back to me and shove him away again. How clever. How amusing._

×××

Tommy's sleeping head lay in her lap. Julia carefully extracted herself from his bed she'd been sitting on and took the stuffed pig he ususally slept with from where it had fallen to the floor. She ran her finger over the head and placed it beside him. Tommy moved, and she was afraid she'd disturbed him, but he simply took the toy and held it to his chest. His breathing remained even.

She didn't leave the room just yet.

" _What was that_?" she'd asked Richard: " _Goodbye_?"

He'd insisted it wasn't.

_"I will see you. In three days."_

That had worked out.

Julia had taken to staring out the window into the dark woods. She made herself think he was out there, coming back to her; any moment there would be a flash of light and his shadow emerging from the trees. He wasn't gone because he had promised, _promised_ her and kissed her after something that was not a goodbye! She pressed a hand hard over her mouth to keep from waking Tommy, and hurried from the room. She reached the solace of the quiet hallway before letting out the wretched sob that torn at her throat, and it's claws left scratches there so that breathing hurt. She was sure she could taste blood.

Julia stood in the dark leaning against the wall and Richard wanted to hold her. Who cared if she couldn't feel it? Would she _know_?

If she did she made no move toward him, no tilt of the head or flick of the eyes. She remained still, and somehow it felt better that way. There was no use teasing her unintentionally, if she could somehow sense him...

There were footsteps on the stairs behind him, but Paul was faster than Richard, who didn't get out of the way in time. Paul knew that suddenly the hall was cool, and Richard knew what it was like to have someone walk through you; like placing a finger in a pond where only the surface is barely frozen.

Paul muttered something consoling to his daughter that Richard couldn't make out; he was only angry that _he_ could not touch her, to wrap his arms her and whisper soft things in her hear. He wanted to press full lips on hers- their last parting kiss had been under promises now crumbled under the weight of crime and in their fashion, with her mouth skewed to his right so she didn't catch much metal.

He could almost hear the train again now and feel her underneath his arms... That had been forever ago. Then, the world had been sturdy under his feet and the future clear in his mind. In the hesitation of his heart and hand had dwelled all the difference. A murderer and a hopeful young thing. A monster and a lamb.

Richard was no longer inside, he knew now, and let out a panicked, fruitless "Julia!"

If his voice could echo here, it would have, so was not outside, either. There was no one and there was everyone, but none of them Julia. There were shapes but no mass around him, noise but no voices, then one sound, the bark of a dog. He looked up and down, but all he could see was the thick, muted colors that seemed to suffocate him.

But he did not suffocate- what a moot fear!- and slowly, slower than the weak tea of dawn light, there was a golden shine again. In it's swayingly simple brightness full of bitter happiness, empty beaches, and angels' tears, it drowned out the cruel atmosphere.

He blinked both eyes.

The bark of a dog again. The clinking of a glass. The low, staticy sound of brush on canvas. The rustle of a thin curtain. True forms, silhouettes, took shape now in the distance, whatever distance was now. They were close and far. It was everything and it was nothing.

_He left for good._


End file.
